Tag Archives: over de flame

Many foreigners visiting America find themselves surprised at the amount of relatively fit and attractive people they can see on the street. In their mind, the typical American is fat, trudging around in clogs with grease stains on their shirt, probably eating a whole pizza right out of the box while they’re walking to the gun store. Instead, they find that Americans come in all shapes and sizes, and as much as restaurant portions seem larger than they’re used to, and the bread tastes much sweeter than anticipated, America’s culture of excess is largely confined to a very small but visible minority of people and restaurateurs who are fucking insane and are hellbent on cramming as many calories into your maw as is humanly possible before your heart explodes and showers the room with bacon bits like some Lovecraftian horror version of a piñata.

Naturally, our job is to help spread the gospel of this brave minority, these innovators who find ways to put a week’s worth of calories on a plate in front of you, these soldiers of fortune who push us to new limits, pushing our faces down into greasy heaps saying “eat your slop little piggies eat your slop!” And while we do our best to make each meal as unhealthy as possible using a variety of methods, one of the most time-honored and respected approaches involves the creation of hamburgers so excessive and absurd that the mere sight of them is enough to drive nutritionists to commit hara-kiri.

But we’re no amateurs. Sure, we could tell you about people who go to fast food restaurants and construct their own caloric monstrosities, or we could point out various chain restaurants’ burgers that double your daily allotment of fat, but that’s child’s play. If you really want to grab our attention, you’ve got to make something so obscene that even our own staff would have to take pause before diving in. But dive in we shall, because this is America, and we’ve always wondered if heart attacks really are as painful as they make it look on TV.